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Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.
Cyril Connolly
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Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.
Cyril Connolly
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
Cyril Connolly
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The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him.
Cyril Connolly
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In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
Cyril Connolly
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Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise.
Cyril Connolly
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'Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea.'
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It is all explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.
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Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
Cyril Connolly
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M is for Marx
And Movement of Masses
And Massing of Arses.
And Clashing of Classes.
Cyril Connolly
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Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.
Cyril Connolly
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There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
Cyril Connolly
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The goal of every culture is to decay through over-civilization; the factors of decadence – luxury, scepticism, weariness and superstition – are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.
Cyril Connolly
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Booksellers, who are a race apart and one and all delightful company, as befits those in whom the ideal and the practical are so nicely blended.
Cyril Connolly
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The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the under-tow cannot drag it back.
Cyril Connolly
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I have called this style the Mandarin style, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.
Cyril Connolly
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Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
Cyril Connolly
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It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.
Cyril Connolly
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No education is worth having that does not teach the lesson of concentration on a task, however unattractive. These lessons, if not learnt early, will be learnt, if at all, with pain and grief in later life.
Cyril Connolly
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Cyril Connolly
Born:
September 10, 1903
Died:
November 26, 1974
(aged 71)
Bio:
Cyril Vernon Connolly was a literary critic and writer.
Known for:
Enemies of Promise (1938)
The Unquiet Grave (1945)
The Rock Pool (1936)
The modern movement
The Evening Colonnade (1973)
Most used words:
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